Louisiana Voice

No one is really sure who first said, “You can always tell when a politician is lying: his lips are moving,” but LouisianaVoice has come up with our own variant to that adage that while not completely original, is certainly applicable.

You can always tell when a politician is feeling the heat: He first attacks the source of his problem and then he rolls out the character witnesses to attest to his integrity.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jeff Landry, current attorney general and would-be future governor of the gret stet of Looziana.

April hasn’t been exactly kind to Landry.

Were it not for the gravity of the charges against a former top Landry aid, the attorney general’s reactions would almost be laughable.

Instead, the behavior of the state’s top lawyer has quickly evolved into a display of self-righteous indignation and reprisals that only serve to further tarnish an already beleaugured office.

And a lawsuit filed by Landry over a stray cat might have been funny had it not ended up costing taxpayers $20,000 in fines against the state. More about that later.

After word leaked out of a whistleblower complaint against then-criminal division Director Pat Magee, the Baton Rouge Advocate made a routine public records request for results of an investigation conducted by an outside law firm. Landry’s response was to file a lawsuit against the reporter who made the records request.

He lost that lawsuit, which was something of an embarrassment for Landry and his office but the records he eventually released were heavily redacted but did reveal that an internal memorandum placed the blame for Magee’s alleged harassment not on Magee, but on the whistleblower who Landry said may have been guilty of sexual harassment himself for not making his complaint sooner than he did.

On Tuesday, Landry paraded a host of WOMEN STAFFERS out at a press conference in an attempt to discredit the whistleblower, former Assistant Attorney General MATTHEW DERBES who has resigned because of what he described as retaliation by Landry. Derbes has retained an attorney. He has filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as a first step to filing a lawsuit on retaliation and employment discrimination against the attorney general’s office.

At Tuesday’s press conference, Sandra Schober, deputy director of the AG’s administrative services division, said that while Magee clearly engaged in inappropriate workplace conversations but that his actions failed to rise to the level of sexual harassment. Because Landry continues to refuse to release all the records of the investigation, Schober’s reasoning remains more than a little vague.

Landry, who has a QUESTIONABLE PAST as a deputy sheriff in St. Martin Parish is quick with the lawsuit trigger finger but REFUSED to sign onto a letter that dozens of other state attorneys general sent to the U.S. Department of Justice condemning the right-wing insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. His refusal, of course, was because he was INSTRUMENTAL in the attack.

Landry also got smacked down in another COURTROOM BATTLE against Gov. John Bel Edwards’s emergency declaration as the COVID-19 pandemic was spiking and before that, he lost a case in St. Martin Parish when he challenged actions by local and state election officials from accepting private, nonprofit funds to help them run elections during the pandemic.

 Then there is that MURKY STORY about a firm owned by Landry importing Mexican workers with the assistance of a felon who had broken federal immigration laws. Landry, of course, is quite outspoken in his opposition to illegal immigration.

Landry even went on a TWITTER RANT that was riddled with incorrect information and which generated tons of ridicule for the state’s top lawyer and which earned him the title of “the stupidest lawyer in the United States” – definitely not the kind of publicity a potential candidate for governor should want.

The latest humiliation for Landry’s office came when the Third Circuit Court of Appeal recently upheld a lower court judge who sanctioned the LSU Veterinarian Teaching Hospital for filing a FRIVOLOUS LAWSUIT against a good Samaritan who agreed to pay up to $2,000 for treatment of a stray cat but ended up paying $4,000 and then getting sued by the attorney general’s office for an additional $1,200.

And the cat died.

There’s another adage that is relevant in Landry’s case: “Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.”